In one of the ancient tongues, Chéngbǎo meant castle, when the term suggested stout stone walls on the surface of a planet, proof against wild and dangerous barbarians raiding across borders. Before foolish emperors built grand walls that spanned continents.
From her conference room just off of her ship’s bridge, Xi Derag Ahma Kier considered nearby space, the wall of hollow darkness that filled nearly a quarter of the display screen in front of her.
In historic terms, geographic ones, a nearly-impassable desert, such as once separated the homelands from the decadence of the coastal nations. Or the endless marshes and forests on the western frontier, behind a single wall of mountains that had kept those barbarians at bay for a time.
As The Eternal, the Lord of Winter reminds us, time is on a circular track, returning again and again, as humans are unable to break out of the biological patterns of entropy and destruction. Even today, a new tribe of barbarians threatens once more to bring it all down. Only we will protect The Holding.
She looked around from the viewscreen at the rest of her bridge and the men and women who commanded the Buran Angustidens Steadfast at Dawn. As a Nightmaster, the vessel was the anchor of the entire border fleet on this swathe of the terrible gulf that both sides called M’Hanii, stretching sideways for light centuries in the gap between arms of the galactic plane.
At Samara, the Lord of Winter had decreed a Barricade, a stronghold, a line in the dirt drawn with a saber. A mark that even the barbarians could understand, one that proclaimed “Here, and no further.”
Time and again they had come, only to be thwarted, as their supposedly advanced technology failed in the face of the greatness that was The Holding. The Eternal. Humans were too fallible to face the might of Sentient systems.
Thus would they always fail.
Five faces stared back at Kier from around the conference room’s table, representing not just the normal three of a Buran warship, but a fourth for the child vessels that Steadfast at Dawn carried with her between worlds and the fifth who was her new master of spies, one recently returned from personally witnessing the barbarians known as Fribourg.
He was a hard, lean man who somehow looked subtly wrong to her. Unconsciously, she recognized that the man was from an obscure genotype, rare in The Holding, but common in the lands of the barbarians. Eyes at once too round and too flat, lacking the subtle fold at the outer edges. Skin that looked utterly washed out without the golden undertones of the homelands. Irises that were rimmed in green, rather than the uniform brown so prized for conformity.
It made him stand out as an individual, rather than a member of The Holding, which must have been painful when he was younger, but put him in a position to better serve by impersonating one of the outsiders regularly, the better to understand what foolish deviltry they would be up to next.
“What have they learned?” she asked the spy.
Even his mannerisms were strange, but this was a man who lived inside the life of another, behind a mask whose slippage would inevitably lead to his own execution.
“The warlord-queen Keller has returned to her own distant holdings,” he said simply. “What few of my sources remain safely in place can report little without risk greater than any possible reward, so little is known, but we surmise that she will not return soon.”
He stopped to take a drink of water. Each of them had containers secured to the table top, but only his actually held anything. This was a crew of warriors, not scholars. There would be time for refreshment after the briefing.
Kier waited while the man drank and composed his thoughts.
“The plot having been thwarted, the men who might have been able to tell the Emperor anything useful all died in the coup attempt,” he continued. “The hereditary leader of Osynth B’Udan and several of his immediate staff knew more, but wisely fled as soon as possible and escaped to Buran, where they have been given asylum. The man is an inveterate conspirator, so he will eventually be settled in a golden cage on a world much closer to the Core, to live out his days in isolated splendor.”
“And the risk of another Imperial assault on The Holding?” Kier pressed. This was the one thing that concerned her. Assassins could handle the rest.
“With Wachturm promoted to supreme command, the risk is greater than it has ever been,” the spy replied. “Previous Grand Admirals were political creatures. Wachturm is a Warrior.”
Enough said. Scholars loved to talk, to dicker, to maneuver their foes into traps. Warriors would go for the throat.
Kier had studied Emmerich Wachturm as much and as closely as his greatest fan might have, aware than the Fribourg Emperor has been planning to dispatch the man to finally face Buran, to face her, directly.
With him in supreme command, he would not come personally, so would have to rely on lesser commanders, weaker tools, to try to execute his will.
Xi Derag Ahma Kier understood in her soul that only Emmerich Wachturm was good enough to threaten Buran’s hold on this frontier, this beachhead holding all of M’Hanii. Most of the rest of Fribourg’s admirals barely rated a footnote.
If the one known as Keller had indeed returned to her own barbaric holdings on the distant fringe of the galaxy, Fribourg was doomed.